I have had to reinstall windows XP sp3 after a virus made it impossible to repair the previous installation. Now the sound cards won't work. The Device Manager is happy that they are installed and are working correctly but the Sounds and Audio Devices says there is no audio device installed.

I have an onboard sound card and a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card which is the one I want to use. I can't get either to play windows sounds or music from media player but the onboard one will play its test sound.

The onboard one is now uninstalled and disabled in the BIOS. But the Sound Blaster still doesn't work.

I have tried reinstalling drivers, removing the SB card and trying the onboard one, moving PCI slots and so many other things that I have begun to forget what I have tried.

The Sound Blaster card worked fine with exactly the same setup before I had to reinstall XP.

2 how are you testing the sound. first off you should be going to control pannel, sounds and testing a windows sound.

3 you shouldnt need to disable the onboard sound, i would turn it back on for now. also try setting bios to optimal defualts

4 under sounds in the control panel, under play back make sure your correct defualt is selcted.

5 under device manager look for UAA 'Microsoft UAA Bus driver for High Definition Audio' see if it has a yellow ! by it. ither way uninstall it, uninstall all sound cards restart computer. install the add in sound card drivers reboot pc. see if that fixes it. if it doesnt help. this may point you in the correct direction http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888111

6 could you please post the motherboard model number to see if we can atleast get the onboard to work

The driver for the sound blaster card was to old to work with XP so I down loaded the correct one from Creative.

I have turned on the onboard sound again and set the bios to optimal defults and reinstalled the sound card driver. I have removed the sound blaster card and software just so it doesn't confuse things untill the onboard sound is working.

To test the sound card I have been doing as you suggested but in the volume tab it says "No audio device" and in the Audio tab is says greyed out "No Playback Devices", "No Recording Devices", "No MIDI Devices". So it won't let you do aanything.

I think the UAA Bus driver may be the problem as it appears to be an older version than Microsoft suggest to install with SP2 and I have SP3 installed. It is version 5.10.0.5010. I have tried to update the driver using the Update Driver function in the device manager but it says it "could not find a better match". I will try the hot fix you have suggested and let you know what happens what happens.

Decided to use System Restore and went back to before I installed the motherboard drivers. Problem solved. Not sure what the difference was but at least both sound cards work. The audio quality out of the 10 year old sound blaster card beets the onboard sound by miles. Its amazing.

Thanks for your help. It was enough to get me thinking on a different track.

good to hear its all sorted. kinda ironic, the night i sent you the posts out of nowhere my laptop got the blue screen of death and wouldnt boot. had to run a windows repair on it. and i lost my sound but it was just a mater of reinstalling the drivers.

somtimes it just takes some fresh eyes to get you going down a differnt track i know when im fixing computers often you get your mind so stuck on somthing and think thats the problem, just need a push in a differnt direction and bingo.